Maps and Legends
We welcome the renowned music writer Don McLeese to Salvation South with a story about the biggest legend in the history of Southern music.
I was lucky enough to have a record shop with a damn good clerk across the street from my freshman dorm. I didn't know that my clerk, Peter Buck, would become, a few years later, the globally famous guitarist for R.E.M. I just knew that he was the perfect foil for my obsessive musical aspirations.
I had heard the legend of the Mississippi bluesman who had sold his soul to the devil, and I wanted to hear his music. Peter pointed me toward a record called King of the Delta Blues, which was the only way you could hear any of the songs Robert Johnson had recorded before his death in the late 1930s.
A few months ago, I got an email from a music writer, Don McLeese, whose work I'd been reading for decades and whose tastes over the years shaped my own. He told me that a mysterious, long awaited book about Johnson was soon to come out. And he had a story to tell about Robert "Mack" McCormick, the amateur folklorist whose obsession with Johnson had resulted in that book finally coming out, eight years after McCormick's death.
Don's story for us this week, "Hellhounds and Phantoms," tells us how the legend of Robert Johnson grew so large in the cultural memory of the South and the world — and examines what it means that the story of one of Black culture's pioneers was almost always told by white people.
Music does make us confront things. It makes us uncomfortable sometimes. And every now and then, it makes the folks who play it very uncomfortable. Georgia singer/songwriter Adam Klein recounts just such an experience when, while playing a song meant to honor Black Americans who killed by police, he was challenged on stage by a woman who, with her husband, was among the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Adam's story will make your jaw drop — and it will make you think about what situations like his can teach us about how we interact.
Of course, interactions with the folks we love are always the most important ones, and Amanda Dobbs, whose writing first appeared in Salvation South not long after we launched, is back with a story about how it's our job to soothe the pain when our friends are hurting. It's a story about doughnuts, too.
Chuck Reece is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Salvation South, the weekly web magazine you're reading right now. He was the founding editor of The Bitter Southerner. He grew up in the north Georgia mountains in a little town called Ellijay.